'Life Unexpected's Unexpected Turns

"Life Unexpected" was indeed an unexpected addition to The CW in January - a heartfelt series about a young girl named Lux who finds her birth parents made its premiere among the network's usual fare of glamor, glitz and vampires.

Show creator Liz Tigelaar, a Guilford High School grad (class of '94), based it on her own life being adopted.

Also unexpected is all that happened in the second season premiere last week, when a fire burned down the bar that Lux's father owned; Lux's recently married mother was fired from her radio job by a religious personality; and Lux herself (Britt Robertson) got a proposal of marriage, accepted, then went off with some other guy who turned out to be her new teacher."It shoots you out of the season like a cannon," Tigelaar says of the premiere, over the phone from Vancouver, where the show is filmed. "You can see how the season will go and how there will be new stories."

Three new characters were introduced in the episode: The dad Baze (Kristoffer Polaha) gets a love interest, played by Arielle Kebbel of "Gilmore Girls." Shaun Sipos plays the teacher of interest for Lux, and a conservative character played by Amy Price-Francis, who has been on "24," takes the radio job of the mom Cate (Shiri Appleby).

"As the season moves on, we'll add more characters," Tigelaar says. "And old characters will return so that everyone will weave in and out of the story to make this tapestry of the whole season."

And as the population builds, "yes, there is the promise of new stories to be told," Tigelaar says. "But it will still come back to the core story."

Changes in the show, Tigelaar does not hesitate to say, came at the suggestion of the network.

Though it got some good reviews (TV Guide's assessment of "'Gilmore Girls' meets 'Juno'" was one blurb that stuck), "Life Unexpected" struggled with ratings since its premiere in January and its return to the fall schedule wasn't guaranteed.

"There was definitely an ebb and flo in negotiations," says Tigelaar, who had to pitch the second season weeks after season one started airing. "I could tell tales about Baze and Kate and Lux and Ryan the rest of my life and not get bored. The CW would kill me and cancel my show, but I seriously could."

In addition to the additional characters and action, the network also requested a crossover episode with the show with which it shares Tuesday night, "One Tree Hill."

"When I first heard we were doing it, I was definitely terrified," Tigelaar says of the crossover, scheduled for Oct. 12. "I didn't know how it could possibly work."

But, she adds, "It totally does. How the stories bumped up against eachother felt totally organic." On each of the shows, after all, there is a high school valedictorian who got pregnant "by dorky athletes." And they can come together when Kate in Portland runs into Haley and Mia of "One Tree Hill" travel to a music fest in Portland, where they meet Cate. "It's pretty seamless," Tigelaar says.

"Just to be fair to the network," she adds, "They didn't say you had to do this story. It was a lenghty process, for me to pitch all my ideas and them responding to what they liked. As season progress, it will start to feel like same show it is."

In tonight's episode, "it's about career day at Lux's school," Tigelaar says. Baze and Cate have to speak there, though neither of them have careers."

"Our approach is basically to broaden out the show, which was a mandate that was really important to The CW - to introduce new characters, to provide more conflicts, foils, love interests to all the main charcters. At the core it's still the same show of people grappling with their lives."

And its characters all must question themselves in the face of new situations, she says. "Who am I now that I've been adopted, now that I'm a stepdad, or a husband, or lost the girl I love. Or lost my job or everything I own. It's those questions."

And "Life Unexpected" is not something else.

"We're not 'Vampire Diaries.' We're not going to kill anybody. We're not a plotty show, we're a character show. We're not always looking at a plot turn to tell the story." But there are some differences. "It's like we still have characters say 'I love you.' Now they have to say 'I love you' while a bridge is falling."

That and the fact that an hour drama has six act breaks instead of five makes writing a bit more challenging.

But she is up for it.

For instance, she brings up the wedding that closed season one. Cate was tying the knot with her radio co-host Ryan and Baze burst into the church with a mind to prevent it. "You've seen people bursting in on a wedding 8 million times," she says. "What was different for our show, was everything surrounding it."

And the fact that Baze was too late to stop anything and the wedding went on.

"I love those conventions, I love those moments," Tigelarr says. I love those soap opera storylines and the dynamics that get set up that I love. I like taking those conventions and figuring out what our takes on those things are; how our characters are different."

Although it's only been on the air in 2010, "Life Unexpected" has been in the works since 2007, Tigelaar says. It's the first series she's taken on her own, after working on shows from "Dawson's Creek" to "American Dreams," "What About Brian," "Dirty Sexy Money" and "Brothers & Sisters" as writer, consulting producer or supervising producer.

Her first job out of Ithica College was sending a script to "News Radio" that was rejected. But she got a job working as an assistant on "Dawson's Creek" and got mentored by writers from Winnie Holzman to Greg Berlanti.

She devised "Life Unexpected" while still working on "Brothers & Sisters" and "Dirty Sexy Money" and feels much more ownership with it. "When you conceive and create something, it's an entirely different level," she says. "The level of investment is so enormous, so it's not a job in any way to me. Obviously it's what I get paid to do, but it doesn't feel like a job."

She still gets back to Connecticut to visit her parents who are now living in the Morris Cove section of New Haven, and she still has friends back in Guilford. And high school keeps popping up in the scripts.

"So much of life is back to high school anyway," Tigelaar says. She named her character Nate Bazile is named after a high school boyfriend (though his personality is more like another ex from high school whose name didn't clear as easily for use on TV). She's name checked her old band on TV, Radioactive Armadillos, and her old gym teacher Mr. Vorazani. Of her own adoption story, it had a happy ending just before "Life Unexpected" premiered, when she met her birth mother for the first time after a childhood in which she was convinced Nancy Reagan was her mother.

"It's been really sweet. I met my birth mother and her husband who she's been with since I was born. It was so sweet to meet them and we continued to keep in touch. They watch the show. It was nice it all worked out. They're good people. And you, as an adopted kid, want to know where you come from. It's nice to know you come from good people."

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4 Comments

This is why the CW is run by morons. This show's first season was amazing. Then the CW has to stick their hands in the jar by telling them to add characters, force unoriginal storylines (teacher/student relationship...again) and to cross over with a show that should have ended after season 6. I wish the CW would back off and let Liz and her crew do their thing. Sadly the more involved the CW gets they'll run this show into the ground and it won't be back for season 3.

I wish there were hundreds of comments above debating the issue of The CW being idiots messing with a great cast and story line like in Season 1. Sadly, there isn't.

I wonder if TV execs ever understood, or heard about, the KISS principal. For the CW folks, that means Keep It Simple Stupid. Please trust the creator to bring believable stories to life each week. There were a few episodes last season that looked as if they were really messed with by someone other than the creator.

I was adopted by two great and loving people as a baby. There are a lot of struggles that adopted kids face that kids growing up with birth parents do not, nor can they relate too. I believe that Brittany has some sense of that, and portrays it well as Lux.

So, I do agree with the comments above, and I wish the show good luck for Season 3.

I really LOVE this show! It has been good from the beginning and it really portrays how the events in the episodes do happen in real life. My situation with my son is very similar to this show and watching these episodes actually give me a sense of hope to dealing with my own dilemmas. I feel very close to the characters and what they go thru. I was very happy when this show came about and I have loved every minute of it on Tuesday nights! I never missed an episode and I do like the storyline! I really do hope that the show stays on for seasons to come and I think it would be such a waste if it was canceled! This show has ALOT of potential and I know that people are saying that it needs work, but what shows don't? Every shows and episodes all have to go thru a "cleansing" process where you see what stays in and what stays out.
Plse don't be too quick to drop the bomb on Life Unexpected b/c I Honestly see this show making it thru many seasons to come!!
Please give LIFE UNEXPECTED another chance....the episodes are not that bad for it to be on a potential cancel list. I know that it will get better and ratings will climb.
There are some shows that sky rocket right off the bat and there are some shows that make it thru ok and shine thru as they go...Life Unexpected is one of them...it needs a little bit of maintenance and a little bit of tweeting, but it is DEFINITELY gonna make it!!!
I really hope my comment counts towards saving Life Unexpected and is worth something!
Thank you for your time in reading this! :-)

ABOUT

Roger Catlin is TV critic for the Hartford Courant and writes a daily column about what's on television called TV Eye. He is also on the board of the Television Critics Association. Before all of this, he was rock critic ... read more